Let's talk about cash drag

It's important not to conflate real life interactions with money and in-game interactions with mesos.
In real life, if you run out of money, you starve and go homeless. In game, you simply find a different job and print more money in a different way.

That said, investing your mesos into assets with utility value can be risky. Look at all the people that got fucked over because of the white scroll change. People used to think white scrolls were a failproof investment plan so they hoarded tons of white scrolls on storage mules only to later find out they'd become untradable with an added conversion tax.

I think a lot of people feel the same way with the current state of prestigious coins - that the price can only go up as more people look to perfect their gear or chaos their weapons. However, recently we've seen large economic balance changes alongside relevant meso flow data reports. Multimaging got a few changes here and there to decrease its scalability, NLC pot price changes managed to rescale the profitability of leech while directly increasing the meso sink, and more people are utilizing their bossing profits (coins) to engage in the market for goods. Who knows what changes may come in the future?

So regarding your questions, I think it's hard to say for sure. I think mesos today can buy you a lot better gear than 5 years ago, but if you are looking to buy prestigious coins to white scroll/chaos scroll, you're competing against players that have access to billions of mesos or sizable meso generating schemes.

 

I think you're conflating inflation in meso terms to a decrease in purchasing power. Investopedia would be correct in their definition.... if ML was run on the US dollar, Euro, etc.

It's likely that the GMs are purposely letting inflation run hot. Inflation can be a very good thing to correct issues in an economy. For example, if you wanted to incentive social play and bossing, you make coins drop from only bosses or social events, and you make them more valuable (have their price rise compared to mesos). You make the mesos that multi-magers produce less valuable by encouraging meso price inflation on goods at the same time. For everyone but the multi-mages, purchasing power has risen substantially. Coins have actually greatly increased income for bossing. There are some issues that come from this such as causing inflation (from a mesos perspective) on low to mid-tier end-game items or crafting supplies such as 30% scrolls (due to higher household income and subsequently increased spending).

Also, how do you know what amount of cash you would need in the near term? I wouldn't say that wealthfront is an unbiased source on this. They seem invested in getting you to invest. I'm not a financial advisor and this does not constitute financial advice. Please see an accredited professional if you want advise. It is of my personal opinion that financial planning really depends on your goals, duration, and the risk that emerges from the feasibility of reaching your goal within your target duration and tolerance for risk. For some people, the best strategy is holding everything in cash. For others, it's to use a YOLO kelly criterion growth strategy with 3x leveraged ETFs, and frequent rebalancing, while borrowing capital with the risk of being margin called. It's hard to really say.